George Murphy, Reagan's political mentor, had a great piece of advice - never get into a p*ssing contest with a skunk - unfortunately, he didn't have any advice on p*ssing contests with more than one skunk - little less a pack of skunks with several million dollars backing -

In the usual manner, there are so many false claims in your suggestions that dealing with any one of them lets the others stand -

This technique of debate is similar to throw enough mud, and maybe some of it will stick: make enough mistatements, and one or two of them will necessarily go unanswered, and thus be mistaken for fact - While a good technique for winning a short term debate, it does little for clarifying long term issues

If repeated over and over and over and over again, this technique works with a certainty - that is it works until people realize what is going on, and then they turn with an anger and ferocity which is stunning -

Perhaps the counter technique is to take one claim that's been especially costly, tear that apart, and thus cast doubt on all of the other claims -

All of the CATS proposals are for toys, none of which are capable of doing any real work, with the possible exception of Black Colt. There already is a glut of small launchers, so why would anyone want to design and build more of them, unless it is on the government's tab?

Fact is, building real rockets capable of doing real work is a difficult engineering task, always done by large national entities, and so expensive that it is always done under direct executive
control - otherwise you end up wasting your resources across too many paper projects -

The exception here was Beal, who had vast private resources, but in the end these were not enough, and the principles proved true again -

Without a directed policy devoted to the development of a few key launch systems, you end up wasting money - and hollering about small toys does nothing to help to develop direction -

CATS -
Costly Absurd Toys for Space Cases

EP

PS - How do you win a p*ssing contest with a pack of skunks?

Wear an NBC suit.

Whatever his faults, Goldin is not a liar -